Learn About the Park

The Shenandoah Valley became a major theater of the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, witnessing hundreds of skirmishes and engagements, including twenty battles.

The Shenandoah Valley supported human settlement for thousands of years that continues today. Virginia's colonial land policies meant both opportunity for colonists but danger for those human buffers against colonial conflicts. Not all settlement was voluntary; enslaved inhabitants shaped the Valley's history too.

Fertile soil and a transportation corridor brought wealth and prosperity to the Shenandoah Valley. They also made the Valley an avenue of invasion and counter-invasion, and a target for destruction. The Civil War wrought permanent change in the Valley's social and economic order.

The period 1730 to 1900 was Virginia’s “Age of Grain.” Economics, transportation, and industry made the Shenandoah Valley the most productive wheat producing area in the South. Belle Grove sat the height of an agricultural economy based on grain and slavery.